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Who Will Survive the AVENGERS ARENA?

Marvel is showing that becoming an Avenger won't be as easy as it used to be.

Marvel has always had numerous titles featuring the younger characters in the Marvel Universe. We've had titles such as NEW MUTANTS, NEW X-MEN and recently AVENGERS ACADEMY. While it wasn't always a walk in the park for the younger characters, it was safe for the most part. Some have seen their share of violence but that will be nothing compared to what's coming up.

Last week we saw the mysterious teaser with blood splattered letters but no clue what it was about. Today, Marvel has revealed what that means.

Dennis Hopeless and Kev Walker will be giving us AVENGERS ARENA. What the heck is that about? It's going to be about death.

Arcade, the funny guy with a bowtie that previously was responsible for kidnapping people and putting them in his Murderworld will be targeting 16 young heroes. Murderworld is moving to its own island. According to Marvel:

There’s only one item on the itinerary for this nightmarish getaway: Kill or be killed.

== TEASER ==

Sounds a little like...The Hunger Games but I'm actually okay with that.

In an interview with Hopeless, he points out that in the past, there weren't really a lot of murders happening in Arcade's Murderworld.

I don't want to give too much away, but I can promise a lot of murder in this new Murder World.

Who will the contestants be? You can see from the image above that we will finally see the return of Darkhawk! Hopefully he'll be able to survive. We'll also be seeing X-23, Hazmat, Mettle, Reptil from AVENGERS ACADEMY and Nico and Chase from RUNAWAYS among others.

Maybe it's not such a good thing that these characters are returning in this series. This will definitely be an interesting read. Let's hope we don't see too many senseless killings of our favorite characters.

If Mettle or Hazmat die I will be so pissed... but it'll probably happen to bring us that "my lover is deeeeeeaaaaad!" angst we love so much...

I couldn't care less if "Wolverine with boobs" kicks the bucket, but do we really need to pointlessly kill off well liked characters? Unless the writing in this issue is anything less than perfect, I can't see fans of these characters being pleased. Hopefully anyone that does get killed only spends a short time in comic limbo before being brought back.

I try to give everything the benefit of the doubt and not judge it from what I've seen of it until I've actually read it. But this really strikes me the wrong way. I'll skip over how I have no idea how this concept can be an ongoing series rather than just a storyarc, and instead just say that this seems like a microcosm of what is wrong with Marvel (and all comics to a larger extent) at the moment. It seems to me that Marvel thinks that the best way to bring in readers is with death, destruction, and just tormenting characters. It's one thing to have a big crossover each year where its a given that somebody is going to die, but now we're actually going to have an ongoing series where the entire concept behind it is "a character that some of you have grown attached to is going to die on a regular basis." It just strikes me as a message from Marvel saying "hey we know that this is what all of you like," and honestly that's not the case. I'm not saying you can't kill off characters, there are some great storylines out there that resulted in the death of characters, but to do this just because you think it will make a successful book is something of an insult to the fans of these characters. And given that Marvel has had a history recently of having trouble keeping the ratings up for books staring younger characters, this really seems to be what they're mindset was going into this idea. It is frustrating to think that they look at a book like Avenger's Academy, which was about a group of kids who were likely to turn into supervillains dealing with powers that were killing them, and they thought the problem with it was that it wasn't dark enough.

And just to finish off I'll say that maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't think all comics should be depressing. Not saying they should all be happiness and sunshine, but books like this just show the world getting so dark that I no longer feel the joy that I felt when I used to read comics. I'll just put it to everyone like this, the Avengers this summer was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had in a movie theater and when I was in that audience everyone was cheering and applauding, and its not because they killed one character in there, its because it was heroes doing what we want to see heroes do and because it was uplifting.

God I hope none of the Runaways characters die in this. I don't want my all time favorite team to die.

Also is Hopeless going to explain the stuff that's been happening with them recently ? Like how Chase survived getting hit by a truck, cause the two issue's they were in Avenger's Academy were terrible.

Okay all you hunger games fans, unless you're willing to call hunger games a rip off of the countless stories of gladiatorial combat that came before it or the few thousand years of it actually happening in real life then you can't really call this a rip off of that.

It really sounds pretty messed up to take new characters and put them in a book just to have them kill each other off. Also really sounds desperate for ideas they clearly wanted to evoke Hunger Games but probably suspected that they would sue so they ended up using Battle Royale imagery instead not many original ideas at Marvel.

Okay all you hunger games fans, unless you're willing to call hunger games a rip off of the countless stories of gladiatorial combat that came before it or the few thousand years of it actually happening in real life then you can't really call this a rip off of that.

@Jonny_Anonymous: By that logic I can call that a rip off of some of the Mojo story lines from the 80s and 90s where its shown that the entire mojoverse pretty much revolves around televised gladiatorial combat. Which could be considered a rip off of countless other stories as well.

Well, ten bucks says that they kill some no name characters, release X-23's trigger scent. her friends stop her, then the all team up an break out, this is to much like a mini series to be a successful ongoing because X-23 can't die, Hazmat and Mettle are too popular to be killed and so are Nico and Chase. This will last twenty issues max.

@Jonny_Anonymous: By that logic I can call that a rip off of some of the Mojo story lines from the 80s and 90s where its shown that the entire mojoverse pretty much revolves around televised gladiatorial combat. Which could be considered a rip off of countless other stories as well.

@moywar700: That's ignorant. I'm sorry, it's just flat out ignorant. I'm not defending AA, because I haven't a clue what it's about, but the idea that a story "needs to be told" is ignorant. In truth, NO story, ever, NEEDS to be told. And they certainly don't have to endure YOUR litmus test of what is an "acceptable" story. You, and people like you, are the ones who are responsible for the homogenization and watering down of storytelling. I'm flabbergasted by the arrogance and ignorance of your post.

@Jonny_Anonymous: Not saying its a bad movie, just saying its not the first time its been done. But almost every movie, book, comic and video game now days is redoing something that's been done before anyway so its barely even an insult to say something isn't original anymore.